WHY HANNAH-JONES DECLINED
UNC-CHAPEL HILL TENURE OFFER
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
Why did Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones decline UNC - Chapel’s belated offer of tenure?
“Look what it took to get tenure,” Hannah-Jones told CBS This Morning Tuesday morning. She noted that every other professional journalist before her since 1980 at UNC - Chapel Hill that had been offered the prestigious position of Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, had also been given lifetime job security (tenure).
“This is my alma mater. I love the university. The university has given me a lot. I wanted to give back. It was embarrassing to be the first person to be denied tenure,” Hannah-Jones said, insisting that she “…didn’t want this to become a public scandal” when she originally accepted a five-year offer without tenure earlier in the year after the UNC Trustee Board declined to take up her tenure offer last November, and again in January.
The fact that negative political opposition became a major factor against Hannah-Jones taking the job, in addition to her race and gender, is something, she says, she could not tolerate.
“To be [originally] denied [tenure], to have that vote occur on the last possible day, at the last possible moment, after threat of legal action, after
protests, after it became a national scandal, is not something I want anymore,” Hannah-Jones told CBS.
“Every person who comes up for tenure should be judged by the quality of their work,” Hannah-Jones maintained.
Having passed through UNC-Chapel Hill’s standard tenure process with glowing success, the trustee board was literally the last stage that needed to be cleared.
“These board members were political appointees who decided that I wasn’t [qualified for tenure],”Hannah-Jones said, adding later that it was “illegal discrimination.”
The heralded black journalist confirmed that she will instead take the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at Howard University. considered the nation’s premiere historically black university, in addition to starting the Center for Journalism and Democracy for serious students of the craft, teaching the principles of good professional journalism, but in the tradition of the Black Press.
According to NC Policywatch, which first broke the Hannah-Jones versus UNC story, she is raising at least $25 million for the establishment of the center, which will not have a name for now..
In a statement from Howard University Tuesday, at least $20 million has already been raised for the project.
Another reason why Hannah-Jones turned thumbs down on UNC-Chapel Hill, even with the tenure vote last week, is that no one from the administration nor the trustee board reached out to speak to her, nor explain anything to her.
The UNC Trustee Board voted in a 9-4 decision on June 30th to grant Hannah-Jones the tenure no other scholar at the school has ever had to fight for.
The decision came one day before Hannah-Jones was officially scheduled to begin working at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
The Hannah-Jones victory is seen not only as a win for black females in academia on college campuses, but justice for free speech advocates in this current corrosive political atmosphere against the teaching of true American racial history.
By the time the 13-member UNC Trustee Board met again in an emergency session last week, it was clear that conservative politics had played a role in denying Hannah-Jones tenure because of her leadership on the controversial NY Times’ award-winning 1619 Project, which retold the story of the founding of America, but this time through the prism of institutionalized slavery.
A major donor to the UNC Hussman School, conservative publisher and alumnus Walter Edward Hussman Jr., was revealed to have sent deriding emails to top UNC administrators about Hannah-Jones, questioning her journalistic professionalism.
It took threatened litigation by Hannah-Jones’ attorneys and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, in addition to a mountain of national criticism that put UNC- Chapel Hill’s academic and institutional reputation at risk, to finally coerce the UNC Trustee Board back to the table after it had refused take up the issue since last November.
Prior to the board vote, angry protestors disrupted the June 30th meeting, refusing to leave, not realizing that the board legally could not either publicly discuss or hold a vote on what was essentially a personnel issue without going into closed session.
That forced UNC police to physically remove students from the meeting place, and some viewing the proceedings online as criticizing law enforcement for being heavy-handed.
After the affirming 9-4 trustee board vote, Hannah-Jones issued a statement which read:
“Today’s outcome and the actions of the past month are about more than just me. This fight is about ensuring the journalistic and academic freedom of Black writers, researchers, teachers and students. We must ensure that our work is protected and able to proceed free from the risk of repercussions, and we are not there yet.”
“She is a journalist’s journalist, a teacher’s teacher and a woman of substance with a voice of consequence,” wrote Hussman School Dean Susan King.
Hannah-Jones told CBS that King was very supportive of her throughout the controversy, and one of the very few she told she was not accepting the position last weekend when she came down to North Carolina.
Observers say this is not finished, and to still expect legal action from Nikole Hannah-Jones against UNC at Chapel Hill for discrimination.
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LEGAL ANALYSIS OF
VOTING RIGHTS
COSBY DECISIONS
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
Last week the conservative majority U.S. Supreme Court handed down another major blow to the voting rights of citizens of color when, by a 6-3 margin, it sided with Arizona in effectively saying, according to POLITICO, that “…rules amounting to only a modest imposition on voters would not usually amount to a violation of the [Voting Rights Act].”
“The mere fact there is some disparity in impact does not necessarily mean that a system is not equally open or that it does not give everyone an equal opportunity to vote,” wrote Associate Justice Samuel Alito for the conservative majority.”The size of any disparity matters. What are at bottom very small differences should not be artificially magnified.”
Most legal experts sat the decision will now make it harder to challenge voting laws as discriminatory.
Professor Irving Joyner of North Carolina Central University School of Law, agrees.
“The old saying that bad facts make bad law applies to this challenge,” Joyner, who is also a practicing civil rights attorney and head of the NC NAACP’s Legal Redress Committee, says.
“The voter-rights related issue has to do with out-of-precinct voting. Typically, on Election Day, voters must vote in the precinct in which they are assigned. That is also the law in North Carolina. The evidence showed that this requirement would only impact a very small number of people. This allowed the [U.S. Supreme] Court to rule, for the first time, that a small racial disparity or impact does not violate the Voting Rights Act. What is a small disparity is not defined, but it now imposes a new legal and factual burden on [VRA] Section 2 claims and you must now establish the existence of more than a small disparity in order to prove this challenge. The racial disparity in the Arizona was 1%. Depending on the political race, a 1% disparity can have a major impact on election success, but this decision now adds a new unknown standard to the burden of proving a sufficient discriminatory impact by an act of the Legislature.”
In other words, if a mandated act of the state legislature causes even a small percentage drop of black voting in any particular election, it will be much harder to challenge that act now under the High Court Arizona ruling.
Rev. Dr. T. Anthony Spearman, president of the NC NAACP, issued a tough statement, saying the 6-3 decision “…endorsed the ugly extremist strain within that has wormed its way into the once-proud Republican Party.
In another headline-making ruling last week, this time by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, the 2018 sexual assault conviction of entertainer Bill Cosby was vacated because the prosecutor who brought the case was bound by the prior agreement of a previous prosecutor not to try Cosby in exchange for his admitting in a civil deposition that he, in fact, sexually assaulted one of the 60 women who accused him.
Cosby, 83, was released from prison after saving almost 3 years of his 3to 10 year sentence.
Atty. Irv Joyner agrees with most legal experts that the reversal of Cosby’s conviction had absolutely nothing to do with the so-called #Me Too Movement.
“At the outset of the original charges against Cosby, the then elected prosecutor struck a deal with Cosby, which provided him with a type of immunity from prosecution, if he would participate in a deposition in a civil suit which this accuser had brought against him. Cosby agreed to this deposition based on this agreement. Cosby and any other person can not be forced to give self-incriminating testimony, but as a result of this agreement, he provided testimony which incriminated him.”
“On this point, the law is clear that when the [original]prosecutor offered not to prosecute Cosby in return for the deposition testimony, the State of Pennsylvania was barred from ever reneging on that deal,” Joyner continues. “The newly elected prosecutor violated the law when he decided to renege on this agreement. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision said that when the State enters an agreement with a person and obtains its end of the bargain, a later elected prosecutor can not breach that agreement.”
“The Supreme Court’s opinion did not analyze the merits of the sexual assault case against Bill Cosby,” Prof. Joyner continued. “It simply stated that the prosecutor knowingly violated Pennsylvania law when he made the decision to prosecute Cosby after he had already been given immunity from that prosecution.”
Cosby cannot be retried in criminal court in this case, and the Pennsylvania statute of limitations ha virtually run out on the other sexual abuse allegations by other women.
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STATE NEWS BRIEFS
RALEIGH CITY COUNCIL CONSIDERING LOCAL CROWN ACT
[RALEIGH] The Raleigh City council is considering instituting it’s own version of the CROWN Act, a national movement to prevent discrimination against anyone because of the appearance of their hair. The Wake County Commissioners passed a CROWN Act in March. Durham was the first city in North Carolina to institute it. Fayetteville is reportedly considering a similar measure.
UNC-CHAPEL POLICE CHIEF RESIGNS AFTER LESS THAN TWO YEARS
[CHAPEL HILL] After less than two years on the job, UNC-Chapel Hill Police Chief David Perry, who has been on leave since last May, has submitted his resignation to the university. Perry did so June 30th in the aftermath of video released showing UNC officers pushing UNC student supporters of Nikole Hannah-Jones out of a Board of Trustees meeting to discuss her tenure. While a national search goes on for a replacement, Asst. Chief Rahsheem Holland is serving as acting chief. Members of the Black Student Movement oppose Holland staying in that position.
STATE LAWMAKERS DECIDE TO DELETE THEIR EMAILS AFTER THREE YEARS
[RALEIGH] In an effort to cutdown on cloud storage costs, state legislators have decided to delete most of their email correspondence after three years. They can, however, choose to archive certain emails for up to ten years. Still, observers say, the new policy will be problematic for pushing for greater transparency from their state leaders. The new email retention policy will also be a problem for those relying on those emails as evidence when filing lawsuits.
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